by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent his childhood in Aracataca, Colombia, near where the fictional town of Macondo was placed in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Born in the late 1920s, he learned the history of his family and country through the stories of his grandparents, who raised him until he was eight years old. His grandfather, a colonel in one of Colombia's bloodiest civil wars, and his grandmother, a storyteller with a love of the fantastic, shared memories and insights that helped to shape the novel he wrote some forty years later. One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays the horrors and wonders in the lives of a fictional family in northern Colombia against a backdrop of recorded history- exploration and discovery, war, poverty, wealth, political conflict, natural disasters, and national lies.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place